Franzen on Wharton

Following up on my 2/19/12 and 2/20/12 posts on recent New Yorker stories, this third blogpost focuses on another story in the Feb. 13 and 20, 2012 issue. When I looked at the table of contents, as I always do almost immediately when I receive a new issue of this magazine, I was very happy to note that there was a piece on Edith Wharton, a writer whose work I have read and re-read over the years, have taught, greatly admired, and truly enjoyed (see my post of 4/18/10). The next relevant piece of information was that the story was by Jonathan Franzen, a writer I have mixed feelings about. Readers of this blog may remember that I liked “The Corrections” very much, but never warmed up to his more recent novel, “Freedom.” (See my posts of 11/8/10, 11/11/10, and 11/13/10, detailing my struggles with and ambivalence about “Freedom”). So I was very interested to find out what Franzen would write about Wharton, and at the same time a bit wary. Sure enough, he first wrote about his reservations about her, starting with a very negative portrayal of her “privileged life” and her “indulging her passion for gardens and interior decorations, touring Europe endlessly in hired yachts or chauffeured cars, hobnobbing with the powerful and the famous,” and so on. One of my first responses was to wonder why Franzen was highlighting this aspect of her life, when many authors have had privileged lives. Was it because she was a woman? And was this really the most relevant information about her and her sublime fiction? He then went on to say that Wharton “did have one potentially redeeming disadvantage: she wasn’t pretty.” Once again, my reaction was to wonder why male critics so often discuss the appearances of female authors. In any case, Franzen’s initial main point is that we need to feel sympathy for an author, and for her/his characters, in order to admire the author and her/his work; since (in his view) neither Wharton nor most of her characters are sympathetic, it is hard to like and/or admire her work. Franzen then dissects three Wharton novels: “The House of Mirth,” “The Custom of the Country,” and “The Age of Innocence.” He speculates on why, despite the main characters being hard to sympathize with (again, in his view) because of various failings, including ambition, crudeness, and shallowness, he, and we, are still drawn to the novels. He decides that “sympathy in novels need not be simply a matter of the reader’s direct identification with a fictional character…One of the great perplexities of fiction…is that we experience sympathy so readily for characters we wouldn’t like in real life.” He gives as examples Becky Sharp and Tom Ripley. And so, after more discussion, Franzen comes around to the conclusion that despite creating unsympathetic characters, Wharton helps readers understand their contexts and why they are the people they are. His concluding sentence is that “What you get…at the novel’s end, is sympathy.” I follow Franzen’s argument, but somehow it all seems like a set-up, a construction and round-about interpretation of Wharton’s fiction that leads to a rather arid conclusion. I still can’t really tell if Franzen actually likes reading Wharton’s work. I know, I know… that is not the point of literary criticism. But I would like to be able to discern that simple fact somewhere in a critic’s writing. Further, although I was interested in Franzen’s take on Wharton, I don’t feel I learned much from it about her or her work, and I feel that the whole essay was a sort of house of cards. Further still -- and I fully realize that this part is probably a bit unfair on my part -- I got the feeling from this piece that Franzen admires Wharton only reluctantly, and that he feels he is doing her a favor by -- finally -- praising her. And that doesn’t sit well with me.